You Might Die - But it Will Cost Too Much To Do Anything So Let's Not.

If you were told that you had a fatal disease and a Doctor told you how to get better, but then an economist came along and told you that the cost of treating you would be too high so it would be better not to do anything - would you sit there and wait to die?

It's that kind of inane logic that governs this quote from Cato Institute Senior fellow, Jerry Taylor who said, “scientists are in no position to intelligently guide public policy on climate change.” Scientists can lay out scenarios, but it is up to economists to weigh the costs and benefits and many of them say the costs of cutting emissions are higher than the benefits”.

Enough is enough and in what media is calling an unprecedented move, over 200 climate scientists have signed a petition urging government leaders in Bali this week, to take urgent action on climate change, stressing that the clock is ticking and that the time to act now is upon us.

Today's action follows last week's petition signed by over 150 global business leaders calling for a 50% cut in emissions. On the one hand we have a huge body of scientists from around the world who study what is happening to the planet and are raising major alarm bells and on the other hand, we have the business leaders who drive the economy calling for action. What stands to delay us are the very people we elected to represent us in the first place. (Or at least appeared to be elected.)

I think the problem is that the science isn’t mature yet. There is a credible body of science which does not agree with the general Co2 global warming theories, and this is increasing all the time.

There are still some serious questions to be answered, and whilst we do need to act quickly we should also recognise that it might be imprudent to make huge decisions based on science that isn’t yet 100% right - the biggest risk of all being that we end up making the wrong decisions and make a bad situation worse. http://www.talkclimatechange.com

It is a common refrain of the political Right that it will cost trillions of dollars to address the problem of global warming and that if it’s a false alarm it will be trillions wasted for no good reason.
Here is some simple logic for you…
If we do act on the assumption that the threat is real and it turns out not to be, then we will indeed have spent trillions that could have been spent elsewhere.
In that scenario, we will have unnecessarily freed ourselves up from our dependence on fossil fuels through the huge investments in developing their alternatives that we will have made.
We will have needlessly reduced our industrial and vehicular emissions, leading to cleaner air for our increasingly asthmatic children to breath. Not to mention the benefits to the global ecology.
We will have pointlessly improved household efficiency in terms of thermal management and general power consumption leading to more people having a bit more cash in their pockets, to spend on the things that our captains insist we all need, (like that shiny new super efficient, internet enabled, washer/dryer/water recycler/irrigator). Need I go on…?
I could also mention certain demonstrably needless trillions that have been spent very recently, for which the knock-on economic and social results have been…well, not quite as fortuitous as those I’ve just outlined. Unless you happen to be an arms dealer or an oil barron that is…
On the other hand, if we do spend those trillions and it turns out to have been necessary, then few would argue that it would be the best spent trillions in history. In fact it seems increasingly likely that this threat is real and immediate despite what a very few highly compromised ‘scientific’ commentators have claimed.
Of course if we choose not to spend the trillions and this all turns out to be a false alarm, then there are no losers except for those who are loosing already. Nothing changes. Business as usual.
The worst case scenario is that we do nothing to mitigate the effects of global warming and the threat materializes as predicted by the climatologists, ecologists and other scientific professionals who for many years have been working to try to understand these things.
In that case we will have witnessed the most catastrophic failure of intelligence in history.
Not a failure in the delivery of that intelligence.
A failure in the assimilation of it.
We were warned but we did nothing…
When the experts in a particular field have a strong opinion on the likely behavior of a system they are studying and that the outcome could be disastrous if appropriate action is not initiated, ignoring the experts is begging for disaster.
It strikes me as being disturbingly similar to some recent willful discounting of intelligence that resulted in the needless spending of those trillions I alluded to earlier…By the very same folk who are leading the charge in discounting the uncompromised, credible climate scientists what’s more!!
Is there a pattern forming here?
A simple diagram with the decisions to act or not act heading the columns and the reality or otherwise of the threat heading the rows illustrates the decision making quandary beautifully. Do the math. This diagram yields four end possibilities. They are outlined above and summarised below for your convienience.

Either the threat is real or it isn’t.
Either we act to protect ourselves or we don’t.

We have no choice as to the reality or otherwise of the threat.
Therefore the only control we have over this situation is the choice as to whether or not to act.

If we don’t act, we get either;
(1 Business as usual, or
(2 A potentially catastrophic future for which we are utterly unprepared and over which we have no control.
If we do act, we get either;
(1 A better, cleaner, hi-tech world, or
(2 A better, cleaner, hi-tech world and the mitigation and control of what would otherwise be a potentially, catastrophic future.

It doesn’t seem to be a difficult choice, but then my wealth is not dependant on oil or guns and bombs to any great extent.

I understand your argument, and I hate the neo-con uninteligence movement, but there really are some good reasons for looking at this issue some more before we act.

1) Just because it might be a dooms-day scenario is not a good enough reason to blow tons of money on the issue

2) Politics, activism, and. government getting all mixed up in the scientific process is bad news…. the scientific community is all about pier review and scientific process, which is slow, but much better than the emotional world of the first three groups listed.

3) Pascals wager isn’t good enough of an argument for action. It is the same argument that Christians use for belief in god (i.e. we have 4 scenarios, god exists and i believe, god doesn’t exist and i believe, god exists and i don’t believe, and god doesn’t exist and i don’t believe….) The problem with that logic is that we use the emotional view of 1/4 odds of being right, and not really “losing anything” if god doesn’t exist. WELL, there is a big problem with this… first, you didn’t have to PROVE that god exists…. second, it is a gross over simplification of a very complex issue. It just isn’t that simple.

I know that were i stand puts me with terrible bed fellows. Oil companies, neo-cons, etc, BUT I that doesn’t change how I feel about the topic. There isn’t enough proof that climate change will do more harm than good, there isn’t enough proof that co2 is the ONLY major factor in climate change. Al Gore and many other fear mongers on the doomsday scenario are also profiting substantially in making people like you and me fear for the future (he has one of the biggest “carbo offset” companies in the world… if that doesn’t say conflict of intereset i don’t know what does.

my point is, it isn’t that simple, and if global climate change is indeed caused by human contributed co2 emissions, we need a clearer indication.

remember:
consensus does not equal truth
correlation does not mean causality

How much clearer of an indication is needed? The world’s scientists have spoken on the matter. The evidence in favour of AGW is increasingly strong - and the indicators are coming in at the higher end of the predicted scale.

This comes out of the scientific process you spoke so highly of in point #2.

And quite frankly, your attack on Al Gore doesn’t do much for your argument.

Let me sum it up for you:

1) The scientific evidence is clear
2) The effects are measurable and are getting worse
3) We know what to do in order to address the problem.
4) Not spending money on the problem will lead to much bigger and more expensive problems in the medium-long term.

Let’s put it this way. If you knew you had a leak in your roof and 99 out of 100 roofers told you that it would cause your roof to cave in, wouldn’t you want to fix it now?

It may cost a lot, and it may affect your cash-flow for a short time. But if you left it to fester, the problem would get worse and worse. And the cost of dealing with it would get more and more expensive.

Or would you rather claim that the matter isn’t settled, and that the roofers who told you to fix it might have a vested interest in the problem. And in the end, you really don’t know if having your roof cave in is a “doomsday” scenario, so why should you pay for it now. You can always ignore the drops of water leaking through the ceiling, and in the end, it’s your children who will have to pay the costs of a full roof replacement anyways. Why should yuo compromise your lifestyle?

Using your analogy Al, many people are looking at their roof and don’t see it caving in.

That many of the world’s scientists have spoken does not take the decision out of the hands of the people in a democracy. And so far, people in Canada will not allow their elected officials to take drastic measures.

I do support moving on from oil to some other eventually harmful energy source in a rational manor.

A few thoughts i found were missing from the page…

More than 26,000 science professionals have said that earth stopped warming over eight years ago. Antarctica is getting colder. Numerically, more of the world’s population would benefit from a warmer planet with more rain than will be forced to relocate due to rising sea levels and drought.

By early on in December 2007, more than 19,000 members of the scientific community had, in writing on a single document, stated clearly that the science used to come to this conclusion was not honest, accurate nor did it resemble the outcome of dozens of other theories.

Don’t forget Paul, that even today, numbers are still numbers and math can’t be argued, more scientists with advanced academic degrees do not support the theories of the Kyoto accord and human induced warming than do.
Remember, this is a Republic.

Here is a short excerpt,
“The treaty is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. Research data on
climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To
the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful.The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.”
-Dr. Frederick Seitz, U.S. National Academy of Sciences

It is important to note that this petition was funded entirely by private donors and not from the industry, much unlike the Kyoto accord and Al Gore’s emissions trading company that has dipped generously into the nearly US$100 Billion dollar market.

So, i believe that our view on the issue is merely one based how many hours the issue has gotten on CNN and NPR not on science, at least that is what the majority of the scientific community currently understands to be true, and again Paul, this is a Republic.
Please do try to find truth, even if it comes from the other side. -Kenneth

Kenneth Valles, have you ever read even one scientific paper on the basic science behind AGW? Why do you only talk about the many frauds of the AGW deniers such as the Oregon petition and others. These are completely fraudulent and do not speak to the science. The scientific community is completely behind the science of AGW, except for a handful of dishonest “scientists” who are the orchestrators behind the various frauds which you have swallowed hook, line and stinker.

Ian,
It is so good to see you coming to this with a clear mind and a desire for the truth.

I Teach Physics. I have read well over eighty book on the subject as well personally stood on and study all seven of the continents on this issue.
Last week i was on a glacier in Argentina and i leave tomorrow for Canada.

Kenneth wrote More than 26,000 science professionals have said that earth stopped warming over eight years ago. Antarctica is getting colder. Numerically, more of the world’s population would benefit from a warmer planet with more rain than will be forced to relocate due to rising sea levels and drought.

Kenneth, how about you provide citations for each of these three statements because I think every one of them is false. If you really teach physics, you should know how to cite your sources.

“More than 26,000 science professionals”
-Meltdown by Patrick J. Michaels
(Patrick J. Michaels, Ph.D., (born February 15, 1950) is a part-time research professor of Environmental Sciences from the University of Virginia. He is a former university Climatologist for Virginia, a position he held from 1980 until 2007. His professional specialty is the influence of climate on agriculture.) -Wikipedia

“Antarctica is getting colder”
“Peter Doran of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a team of scientists, report finding a marked decrease in temperature—as much as 0.7 °C per decade since 1966.”
-The BBC, CSmonitor, Enviro science and technology, CAPMAG,

“Ocean levels will rise less than 23 inches.” -David Legates PH.D Climatologist UNIV. of Delaware.
Thus affecting A very minimal number of people. While increased tempuratures will increase rainfall. Here are a few large bodies of unused land that are so due to extreme cold or lack of rain fall. Antarctica, Northern Canada, Siberia, Australia, Mongolia, the Gobi, the Sahara and Greenland.

Next time please do try to have the hocks to put your name down brave and bright,
Kenneth Valles

Read all about Patrick Michaels by searching for Michaels here at DeSmogBlog. Likewise Legates, another denialist.

As for Peter Doran:
http://www.desmogblog.com/researcher-slams-skeptics-distortions-in-new-york-times-op-ed“Our results have been misused as ‘evidence’ against global warming by Michael Crichton … and by Ann Coulter… In the meantime, I would like to remove my name from the list of scientists who dispute global warming. I know my coauthors would as well.” – Peter Doran, Op-Ed Page, New York Times, July 27, 2006

Your citations are inadequate Kenneth. If you were a real scientist you would not brag about reading 80 books, because you would have read thousands of articles. Science books are apt to be out of date by the time they are published.

“VJ”, Very good!
Yes, hocks are indeed an animals hind legs, well lets be honest, a portion of an animals hind legs around the centre or “knee” of the leg.
Hocks is also a term used by humans to express a feeling, Usually tied to honour and genitals. I.E. the honour of standing naked in front of those you revere with your penis and testicles still attached to your groin.
Don’t worry about not knowing this VJ, not everybody can know everything, you know.

“the quote about misusing our findings is true but don’t misunderstand that too… Our study did find that 58 percent of Antarctica cooled from 1966 to 2000.” -Peter Doran, realclimate.org August 16th 2007
Doran’s name has been removed from the list (see below).

I do read a lot of articles VJ, but i don’t have a close count on how many and it would be foolish to guess up a number. I also know from many i have worked with that articles can be dangerous because they are often written with haste.
And VJ, I didn’t “brag” about the books but was rather scornfully asked.
It is also important though, to remember that this debate is a lot older than your interest in it is. I’ve been reading a little while now and i do take information in from many sources, as you know, i am here.

Allow me to tell you something VJ, yours, and the others here, obvious fury with my skepticism is tragic for you and for humanity, Skepticism is the very drive of science and your warming debate. I, and any other educated or intellectual person will tell you,

Kenneth, you are talking to grownups here. When you make adolescent remarks like “grow a pair!”, the grownups roll their eyes and assume you are an idiot. It is especially ineffective when you are addressing grownup women who neither want nor need that anatomical feature. Grow up, Kenneth.

If you are silly enough to think the Oregon petition means anything, all your reading has not benefitted you.

Your skepticism shows no sign of being educated. You have not learned to be skeptical of the denialists’ arguments. You could educate yourself by reading the articles on this site instead of wasting time making the same old arguments which were exploded years ago.

“Silly”, me. i do still consider the Oregon petition to mean something, i think of as a way of saying “i have a science degree from a respected institution, i have relevant work experience and reports to prove so and i don’t think that enough is known to go ahead with the Kyoto protocol at this time” but times about 19,000.

If you do, and i mean this honestly, have something i should know about the petition that has brought you to your view on it, please do share it with me.

Interestingly enough, it was an article from this site that brought me here. I have read a decent amount here in the past few days because i was sitting in airports and found the site’s perspective a little unique.
I do challenge the “denialists’ arguments” quite intensely,
but not here on this page that seems so decided already, that would not be adding something new to think about.

I’ll tell you what VJ, i’ve spent a decent amount of time here in the past few days, reading and writing. why don’t you try out a site that puts you against the wind for a little while and we’ll share our findings.

It was not a direct quote of you, though it is a quote of someone else who shares your fixation with your sexual organs; but it is an example of the kind of thing you were saying. Grow a brain, Kenneth.

I read some rightwing sites as well as plenty of argument on real science sites. I don’t spend too much time on the rightwing sites because the mass stupidity there is so annoying.

Tell you what, go read gristmill’s discussion of the Oregon petition and what is wrong with it. I’m sure you can find the link if you try.

Kenneth Valles, you can say what you want on a blog about qualifications but they are absolutely meaningless since no one can confirm whether you are being honest or not.

What counts is how one explains the science. Since you are trashing the science of AGW, that makes you a very poor example of a “physics” teacher since physical laws are in agreement with the causes of AGW. Claiming to have all sorts of “qualifications” is common practice by the AGW deniers. However, their lack of basic understanding of the simple laws of physics and chemistry shows that they are either completely ignorant of the subject they claim to have expertise in or are dishonest. Take your pick, Mr. Valles.

Ian, claiming that climate scientists have a solid understanding of all the major factors influencing climate is not true either. That is not “trashing” the science of AGW, it is recognizing the current limits of the science.

Paul S/G, once again you are showing that you do not understand how science operates. It works on the 90 to 10 ratio. That is 90% of the understanding is accomplished in the first 10% of the work. The remaining 90% of the time is spent on polishing the basic findings.

That ratio also seems to work here where 10% of the posters (Rob, JD, Paul S/G, Kenneth Valles) provide greater than 90% of the rubbish promoted by the AGW deniers.

Paul, why do you hate scientists (James Hansen in particular) and try to denigrate their positive contributions to society? You are a very disturbed person.

Dear Mr. Valles,
I found your post quite humorous and would like to thank you for the entertainment.

Among the many issues that I found particularly enjoyable are the assertions that some 26000 and 19000 scientific “professionals”, at various times, considered climate science to be dishonest. Being in the field of earth science myself, I’d estimate that there are fewer than several thousand climate scientists worldwide as opposed to the numbers you propose. It strikes me that you may be including TV weather people and dental hygienists in your estimates.

I also applaud you for introducing me to Dr. Seitz. Based on my brief google search (and some wonderful links on wikipedia), it appears that Dr. Seitz was quite a promising physicist… in the 1930’s. After a long career in physics and academic administration Dr. Seitz went to work as an advisor to R.J. Reynolds (of the US tobacco industry) in their Medical Research wing (1979). In 1989, the CEO of Reynolds is quoted as saying, “Dr. Seitz is quite elderly and not sufficiently rational to offer advice” (http://tobaccodocuments.org/pm/2023266534.html?pattern=fred%5Ba-z%5D%2A%5CW%2Bseitz%5Ba-z%5D%2A&#p1). Quite an indictment coming from a pre-settlement Tobacco Executive. Dr. Seitz’s assertions that climate change is bogus stem from a report written in 1994 (5 years after the Tobacco industry considered him senile and 13 years ago at a stage when climate science was not nearly as well supported as today) and consists primarliy of Dr. Seitz criticizing scientific conclusions w/o the basis of any real evidence or work of his own… just the opinion of a scientist retired for ~27 years (at that point) who had been elected to the National Academy for work done some 40+ years earlier in an completely unrelated field. But, Hey! Who’s counting?

The Tobacco Industry considered him too loony at 78 to help them gain any traction in trying to deny the link between cancer and cigarettes, but the Climate Change deniers haven’t quite gotten their fill of Seitz yet… thats a sorry state to be in since he was 83 and must have been in a much better frame of mind when he wrote his now irrelevant piece on the state of climate science.

A old scientist is a bad scientist! So, after some thought and reflection and 23 seconds on Goolge i found a few more names for ya that signed that petition about the kyoto protocol so you might do the needed research on them too!
Enjoy!
Kenneth

Where do they work? What are their professional specialties? How many peer-reviewed climatology papers have they published? Have often has their work been cited by other researchers? A list of names with no information about their relevant professional qualifications means absolutely nothing.

If you go to the IPCC web-site, you can easily find enough information about the IPCC authors to make informed judgments about their professional qualifications. This is *not* true of the OISM petition.

With a Vanity Fair cover guy with some claim to fame as a Tennessee tobacco farmer heading to Stockholm to collect the Nobel PR Prize, it is ironic Mr.Ferguson should echo that learned journal’s claim that the then-President of Rockefeller University “directed a 45M tobacco industry effort to hide health impacts of smoking”

At the time of Frederick Seitz’s presidency, the CEO of RJ Reynolds – the tobacco company – was on the Rockefeller University board, and RJ Reynolds allocated $5 million a year for Seitz to direct towards such basic research as he saw fit- a decision in which his having been President of the National Academy of Sciences doubtless figured.

Where did the money go ?
Try http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1997/prusiner-autobio.html

There you can read Stanley Prusiner, the doyen of Prion research crediting Seitz, and RJ Reynolds, for supporting the work that won him the Nobel Prize in Medicine–without benefit of an Oscar.

if loads of scientists, business people, and others are aware of what needs to be done to change our climate, or make it turn; why don’t we simply take charge? we can start taking actions that infect the rest of the world. we can choose who we purchase from. we can choose to reduce our own emmisions. we can spread the word. I fear that the government is only going to talk about the issue and we must take it into our hands.

As a scientist, I don’t think scientists should decide policy. Scientists should inform policy by identifying problems, estimating likelihoods of various outcomes under a variety of scenarios, etc. Economists are should also inform policy, but they should no more determine policy than the scientists. The people and their representatives should decide policy in an iterative process with scientists and economists providing information. In weighing the information, folks should compare the uncertainty in economic models and scientific ones, compare the level of agreement in the economic and scientific communities, and, if they can’t understand all of the arguments, try to evaluate the basic reasons for the conclusions (and differences in conclusions) that are reached.

Steve L’s point is my point. I do not believe in leaving public policy to “guys in white coats” - in any discipline. Climate scientists do not have the training to tell us whether the costs associated with reducing greenhouse gas emissions are less than, equal to, or greater than the costs of business as usual. And that’s something you would want to know before signing off on greenhouse gas emission reductions. Likewise, economic calculations about the same are heavily predicated by how you feel about future costs and benefits. If you believe in valuing dollars and lives in, say, 2150 as much as you value dollars and lives today, then it’s hard to accept IPCC reports and not conclude that GHG emission cuts pass a cost-benfit test. If you apply a discount rate of, say, 3, 5, or 7 percent, then it’s hard to accept IPCC reports and not conlude that GHG emission cuts don’t pass a cost benefit test. But how you value the future is subjective, and economists have no objectively “better” preference regarding that matter than you or I.

I’m sure many people who read this blog would argue that we should value our great grandchildren’s lives and money as much as we value our own. Fine - nothing objectively wrong with that belief. But if you do, hand in your Rawlsian membership card (wiki John Rawls if you don’t know what I’m talking about). That’s because you’re endorsing a policy that transfer wealth and wellbeing from the relatively poor (us) to the very rich (them). That is, even if the Stern Report is correct about the economic costs of climate change, real per capita income in developing countries will be $100,000 in 2100. Moreover, if you value the future every bit as much as you value the present - and thus embrace, say, a 0.1% discount rate (that is, Stern’s discount rate) - then simple math (perfomed for our benefit by economist Bill Nordhaus at Yale) suggests you ought to be saving 97.5% of your income.

I do not believe that “the experts” in any field should be dictating climate policy because there are plenty of important value judgments built in to those policies and experts however defined have no objectively better values than you or I.

I told all of this to the reporter in question, but alas, news stories don’t allow this sort of discussion given the restriction on news print, etc.

Sorry, I inadvertently botched a figure. The future scenario runs performed for the IPCC under various climate change forecasts demonstrates that per capita income in the developing world would likely be higher than it is today in the developed world.

So, I appreciate informed ideas from anywhere, but I do NOT understand the the happy assumption that most (including IPCC) make that per-capita incomes will automatically and smoothly rise over the next century, with accompanying reasoning about discount rates. I actually think we may well have periods in which the effective discount rate acts *negative*.

TWOGOODSOURCES:

I strongly recommend:

Benjamin K. Sovacool, Marilyn A. Brown, “Energy and American Society - Thirteen Myths” [see Amazon, I posted a review], which includes an article by Jerry.]
======

INREALWORLD, EXERGYISIMPORTANTFORWEALTH

See Ayres & Warr, “Accounting for Growth: The Role of Physical Work”, http://www.iea.org/Textbase/work/2004/eewp/Ayres-paper1.pdf , which seems (to a non-economist) pretty credible, and it says:

Over the last ~100 years:
a) The biggest boosts to wealth have come from increasing exergy [= energy * efficiency].
b) Over last 20-30 years, we’ve gotten some boosts from computing.

PEAKOILANDGAS:
I think we face Peak Oil, within the next 10 years, unless you believe T. Boone Pickens, in which case the Peak hit in 2006. Peak Gas is a few decades later. If anyone disbelieves this, please explain why.

Much of our energy comes from oil and gas, and as the total amount of that energy slowly lessens over the next few decades:

- oil/gas efficiency has to increase to keep total oil/gas exergy constant, and increase even faster to keep oil/gas exergy/capita constant in the face of population growth. Installed base issues make this nontrivial.

- we have to rapidly increase use of non(oil+gas) sources like wind, solar, etc for electricity, and develop cost-effective biofuels for non-local transport.
Nuclear: I was once studying to be a nuclear/high energy physicist, so I have no apriori anti-nuke views, but even ignoring disposal costs, I don’t think we can build nuclear power plants fast enough, and even if we could, it looks like their economics are totally dominated by negawatts (saving energy via efficiency) and other sources. See Amory Lovins’ chapter in Sovacool/Brown.

-BUT, if the inevitable pressure causes to start burning even more unsequestered coal, I believe the IPCC numbers, or worse. This may seem weird, but I think it is *good* if petroleum geologists do their best, if only to hold off coal, but NOT if we keep wasting the oil+gas. The longer we can stretch that, the more time we have to cost-effectively replace infrastructure without destroying the economy.

- STILL, we have a hard slog over the next few decades, even in the developed world, to restructure our economies to keep the exergy/capita even.

We also have rapidly-rising demand in places like India and China, unsurprisingly, they want to get rich, too, the same way we did, primarily by burning fossil fuels
- to make concrete & steel
- to run factories to make stuff
- to export halfway around the world on oil-burning ships
- to mechanize farming more, at least somewhat, to help feed the people who’ve moved off the farms to work in the factories
- and to have cars instead of bicycles

Of course:
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/11/04/asia/AS-GEN-China-Fuel-Crunch.php

THEPHYSICALWORLDDOESN’TFOLLOWMOORE’SLAW
I’m a Bell Labs/ Silicon Valley guy who has spent his life building/forecasting technologies to make things work better. [I suspect almost every person reading this uses hardware or software technology that I had some small part in making happen]. I don’t minimize what we *can* do if we put our minds to it.

BUT, I also used to help sell supercomputers to petroleum geologists worldwide, to auto companies, airplane companies, etc - hard-work engineering improvements and magic are *different*.

I also grew up on a farm, so unlike many, I don’t think food magically materializes in grocery stores.

I do *not* think Moore’s Law, cheap iPods and Internet make the real, physical world irrelevant, and major efficiency improvements in the physical world happen a whole lot slower than in the computer world. Buildings, ships, and trucks have much longer life cycles than laptops, and agricultural revolutions don’t happen that often either.

DEVELOPED-WORLDAGRICULTUREANDTRANSPORT (ESP. N AMERICA)

1) North American agriculture allows 2-3% of the population to (over)feed the rest of us, and be able to ship food elsewhere. A farmer with a horse is richer than one without, and a farmer with a tractor is richer yet. One with tractors, combines and access to a cheap transport network is far above subsistence farming. On the other hand, China has 200M farms, averaging 1.6 acres/farm, and I think about half of the population are still farmers. (USDA) I’ve visited a few Chinese farms. They’d think a Kansas farmer unimaginably wealthy… and the typical African subsistence farmer would think the Chinese farmer well-off. BUT:

Developed-world farming, especially in North America, is *very* dependent on:

a) burning petroleum to run farm machinery,

b) burning petroleum to transport food from where it is grown to where people live.

c) water, which in some cases comes from (not-quickly-renewable) aquifers like the Ogallala, whose levels continue to drop. In other cases (like in California and other parts of the West), it comes from snowpack, whose lessening causes us to have to spend a lot of money just to stay even with what we have now. For some of us, getting water costs *energy* and building more dams. Also, in CA, a big chunk of some of the best farmland in the US is *already* below sea level, and we can deal with some sea-level rise, but redoing all the dikes will cost a lot of money, just to stay even. That money won’t go to R&D or education or other useful investments that tend to increase wealth.

d) using fertilizer - nitrogen-based ones come from natural gas [whose Peak trails Peak Oil by several decades, and which gets used for other things, like generating electricity and heating houses….]

http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/FertilizerUse/Tables/Table8.xls gives fertilizer prices for 1960-2006. You can either eyeball the data, or do the simple exercise of deleting extra rows of the early years, so you get one price/year, selecting year+prices, and doing an XY-scatter-plot chart with lines), and see what conclusions you draw about the price of fertilizer. [Hint, up fast for every fertilizer type, but especially over last decade.]

IF, over the next few decades, anyone thinks:
- there is some reason to expect fertilizer to get cheaper
- that water gets cheaper
- that transport, especially medium/long distance gets cheaper
- that food gets cheaper

THEN please explain why, and I’d be happy to listen.

BUT, BUT, Moore’s Law gives us cheaper iPods, so we’re getting wealthier! and poor farmers get cellphones! And farmers use electronics, too!
(and we can do better GM crops, and we can breed better fuel crops, like better miscanthus-variants for cellulosic ethanol … and we had one Green Revolution already, courtesy of Norman Borlaug & co, and we will have solar-charged electric tractors … I doubt hydrogen, though.)

So why worry about mundane physical junk like water, fertilizer, and oil?

The physical world is still there, and having to discard investments before the end of their normal life does *not* make anyone wealthier, and does *not* make food cheaper. Making a big non-optimal infrastructure investments sometimes has long-term effects, with big opportunity costs, as anyone who’s ever played SimCity knows. For example, the UK wants to tear down 700 houses and expand Heathrow Airport around 2020 to accomodate big growth in air travel. Maybe that’s a good idea, but I’d be happier if their plans modeled Peak Oil effects on jet fuel prices.

2) The North American economy depends on oil for medium and long-distance transportation for food and everything else. Amazon is great, but the books still need to get shipped. The Chinese economy depends on shipping stuff long-distances, and the world economy now has tight-coupled long-distance supply chains, many just-in-time for efficiency (and resulting low cost to consumers). All good … but I once visited the (impressive) NUMMI car plant, and happened to see the effects of having one truckload of parts get delayed by a truck breakdown. [Factory stopped cold.]

http://www.eia.doe.gov/bookshelf/brochures/diesel/
“In 2006, diesel fuel accounted for about 16% of total refined petroleum products and 77% of the total distillate consumed in the U.S.”

“OUTLOOKFOR 2007 AND 2008
Retail diesel fuel prices are likely to remain elevated as long as crude oil prices and world demand for distillate fuels remain high. EIA expects that national average retail diesel fuel prices will hover around $2.70 per gallon through 2007 and 2008, primarily due to the forecast for the price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil to average near $64 per barrel.”

We all know oil prices jiggle around, but can someone explain why they think they aren’t going to trend higher over the next couple decades? Do you think Athabasca oil sands will *reverse* the price increase? ANWR? I’m happy to listen, but I’ve talked to a lot of oil folks over the years in the process of helping them find oil more efficiently, so I need to hear serious arguments.]

BURNALLTHEOILANDGAS, A ONE-TIMEINHERITANCE
In practice, we’re going to burn ALL of the oil and gas we can get at any reasonable prices, because it’s just too useful. The transition *away* from petroleum is rather different from the wood->coal->petroleum transitions, given the superior energy density of petroleum. *This* time, a fuel-type usage will decline, not because something comes along with better energy characteristics, but because the supply diminishes, and the price goes up and up. Oil+Gas folks *will* sell all they can find.

IF we think of it is a one-time wealth inheritance, AND we invest it in efficiency, as of infrastructure and vehicles, and if we do every thing we can to stretch their use as long as possible, *maybe* we’ll get to a no-petroleum economy in an orderly fashion [see Hirsch Report, or the Sovacool/Brown book] without massive dislocation, and I’m part of an area [Silicon Valley, including venture capitalists & entrepreneurs I work with] who are trying our best to help this happen.

But there is a lot of work to be done, and it is totally unclear why there should be a smooth growth in per capita income while it is going on, since the “Free Ride” of cheap petroleum is history.

A friend’s 13-year-old daughter asked him “Daddy, are you adults going to leave any oil for us?”
[A, probably yes, but not for her kids, and if she has to pay for own gas when she’s a teenage driver, it’s not clear how much driving she’ll do. But, she’ll have a cheap iPod.]

PlanA
Of course, we can burn the oil&gas (& coal) as *fast* as we can, by fighting every fuel economy effort, inhibiting improvements of building energy efficiency, retarding growth of distributed electricity generation, importing bottled H2O from Fiji, etc. That seems to be PlanA for a lot of people, and coal people love it especially.

Of course, PlanA also involves selling a lot of the US to Canada, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Venezuela, Nigeria, etc [well, I don’t mind the first one quite so much, but that might have something to do with owning Canadian property and some CA$-denominated things bought when the CA$ = $.80 … should have bought at $0.60 2 years earlier.]

For some reason, a lot of Americans just *love* PlanA and are doing everything possible to implement it. Does anyone remember the economic effects around 1974, as an instance of “something important gets more expensive before we’ve reworked our economy to use a lot less?”

WHENDOESTHEDEVELOPINGWORLDGETRICH>?
Personally, I have doubts about *any* claims about when the per capita income of the developing world exceeds that of current developed countries. *I* don’t know, but I think the casual assumption of smoothly-growing wealth (in the face of Peak Oil & Gas, pressure on water) is unconvincing. I’m happy to listen to reasoned arguments why … BUT:

Most of the population growth of the next 50 years is expected in poor countries, and a big fraction ofthe world’s poor are farmers.

-Subsistence farmers who cultivate by hand are not very rich anywhere I’ve been.

-Farmers with draught animals are better off: Old Amish (no tractors or electricity) do OK with their horses, but it’s hard to compute their income levels, not everyone prefers that lifestyle, and Moore’s Law doesn’t make them richer.

-Tractors are not always better than other alternatives, no-till farming is a plus, and less use of fertilizer is a plus. Still, farmers with tractors are usually richer.

But, what do those numbers mean, and does one believe them?

- They say a bunch of farmers who cannot now afford tractors are assumed to get rich enough to do so by 2030 [but less in SS Africa, and tsetse flies inhibit use of draught animals in many areas, which leaves hand cultivation.] India & China do build a lot of tractors.

-So for those who get tractors, what fuel will they use? Anyone who believes it’s petroleum: please explain why you think such farmers can then afford to outbid everyone else fighting over dwindling supplies.

- For farmers to get rich, they need to grow more than they need and ship it to consumers, which needs transport infrastructure, which rich countries built years ago … using cheap petroleum. oops.

Optimistic hope: Solar-charged electric tractors, at least small/medium ones are fine, although I’ve yet to see replacements for the big 200-500HP John Deere’s.

http://www.renewables.com/Permaculture/ElectricTractor.htm

IF the developed world gets good at electric vehicles ANDIF SiliconValley & others hammer the cost of photovoltaics &CSP way down the cost curve, and batteries as much as we can, those are probably the best hope for poor farmers, especially in Africa, because they work off-grid, and don’t need fuel infrastructure difficult to get. Of course, for medium/long-range transport, fuel seems requirable for a long time. One has to hope for cellulosic ethanol or jatropha biodiesel, and that again, developed-world technology builds much lower-cost processing.

SUMMARY
I believe that EXERGY is an important factor of wealth growth, and we’re shortly going to have LESS oil, and a few decades later, less gas, and if we use a lot of coal to make up for it, AGW will get worse even faster. We have hard (but possible) work to do to keep the total exergy constant over the next few decades. It’s hard to see how we smoothly raise the exergy/capita on a world basis any time soon, unless population growth stops. The technology-driven part of growth ought to continue, although I expect a drag from zero-extra-benefit-but-necessary things like building dikes, dams, and seawalls.

Anyway, I could get convinced that the rising-wealth-paradigm that we’ve seen for 100+ years will just continue smoothly along through the next century, but right now, I’m not convinced.

A very simple example, and I would like your comments in light of your “I do not believe in leaving public policy to ‘guys in white coats’ - in any discipline.” posture…

The North Atlantic cod fishery… When scientists showed that there were problems in the cod populations, which were almost certainly due to over-fishing, the call went out for action…

The ecobiologists were generally calling for early and drastic cuts to fishing… The fishery itself, and most economists, called for more modest cuts… Based on various “cost-benefit analyses”, compromises were made to continue fishing for some time… and the fishery collapsed…

I.e. the science was trumped based on the more dominating “needs” of the fishery and the economy… which were nonetheless themselves demolished by this approach…

The problem is that most economics views the environment - resources, biodiversity, ecological services - as kind of abstract “sources and sinks”. The assumption is that interactions between the human economy and the environment can be readily reduced to inter-generational discount rates, substitution rates, productivity gains, etc., with very little regard to the physical and chemical processes that underly the transformative processes we impose on the environment, with almost all of our activities…

In the “competition” between environmental scientists and economists about who has better insights into how the “real world” works and how much relative input they should have into policy… well, let’s just say that the scientists actually have to obey such things as the first and second laws of thermodynamics, whereas neo-classical economists abstract away from them and effectively ignore them… Imho, it is economics which is FAILING us, and it is incumbent upon economics to become more fluent with the science before it can simply assert that its answers are necessarily better in guiding policy…

Finally, regarding those intertemporal discount rates… There is no way for future generations to have any influence on the “correctness” of those rates whatsoever… Which leads to a highly assymetric opportunity set for present generations… And as I think you are well aware, there is a great deal of debate as to whether the observed, aggregrated discount rates in the market place (which cuts to your example of the individual’s saving rate), as expressed by the interest on saving accounts, equity risk premia, etc., are the correct ones when dealing with inter-generational environmental issues like AGW… Nordhaus’ example above simply is a declaration that they are… If they are not fully reflecting the costs we are imposing on the future, then they simply are incorrect…

The oceanic fisheries narrative is an interesting one that actually cuts against your argument. The main reason that overfishing occured was because no one had a property right to the underlying resource. In short, it was a classic example of Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” playing out before our very eyes. Resource economists (at least, within academia) did not respond to it with calls to balance the costs and benefits of overexploitation. They responded with calls to turn he public commons into private property and thereby alleviate the dynamics that produced excessive harvests. Those calls resulted in the establishment of the Individual Trading Quotas (ITQs) for fish harvests in Iceland and elsewhere, and most studies that I am aware of credit those ITQs with a substantial reversal of the tide that was depleting the fishery stocks in question. Calls to “save the fish” saved nothing. Calls to reorder underlying economic instutions - made by many economists, including those at the Cato Institute (and Environmental Defense) - did.

Granted, there were economists hired by the fishing industry to argue against catch reductions - and ITQs! - but their arguments did not persuade and did not represent the disciplinary consensus. But that’s not saying anything of consequence. There are scientists, after all, who argue against worrying about greenhouse gas emission reductions, but that doesn’t seem to bother people who believe that other scientists are making better arguments.

A more relevant and more difficult narrative to make your point might be the destruction of the ecology of the Great Plains in the 19th Century. Harnessing those lands for agriculture produced tremendous wealth and human well-being for generations then, generations today, and generations tomorrow. But it came at a cost - the loss of the buffalo and dozens of other species at any population worth carrying about. How should one feel about that? There is no right or wrong answer, but a cost-benefit calculation would probably give it a thumbs up. But remember, I don’t demand that we all defer to cost-benefit tests when making public policy and grant you that there is no objective reason for an alternative preference - to leave the Great Plains alone - to be ruled out of order.

My point here, again, is that this is a values debate and adjudicating those value disputes is not the black and white morality play posited by many people on the Left … or Right, for that matter.

Do future generations “get their say” in markets? Yes. Speculators in commodity markets are looking out for future consumers. Land and stock values are heavily influenced by expectations about future production and profitability. Wealth in inherited and passed down to the future … with interest. Other examples abound. Do future generations “get their say” in politics? Uh, no. Just take a look at the social security debate if you need evidence on that point.

Thank you for your response, although I am somewhat surprised to see parts of it.

Regarding “property rights”, the cod fisheries, and atmospheric CO2… I understand the role that property rights have played in various previous environmental successes. The specific “commons” under discussion now, however, is rather different than a specific river, or watershed, or fishery. How can someone “own” the air “over” the Arctic, or the water in the in middle of the ocean? How could you assert your property rights over same, or attempt to claim for damages to your property from someone 10,000kms away and perhaps centuries prior? The nature of the problem of a well-mixed, long-lived deleterious gasses like GHG’s undermines the whole rationale for using property rights as a tool. Once again, this is because the science (physics and chemistry) of the problem has to be paramount BEFORE you start applying economic solutions to it.

I happen to know that some of your personal writing has alluded to this dilemma, so I don’t want to make too big a deal about it, but I am surprised you would so quickly trot it out. The failure of the Canadian cod fishery was because the scientific warnings were ignored, hard stop, regardless of the precision or the imperfection of the specific economic tools proposed.

ITQ’s (whether for cod or CO2) - which are rather a different “property right” than what libertarians originally had in mind - are basically due to a realization that the market, left entirely to its own, is not fully incorporating external costs. But in order to establish those quotas - for cod, CO2, SO2, etc. - you again have to defer to the science for parameters… If not the scientists, who?

“Speculators in commodity markets are looking out for future consumers.” Odd, I thought that in a Hayek/Smith/Cato view of the world, they are looking out for themselves, and that the benefits they may or may not spin-off to others is dictated by the ubitiquitous “Invisible Hand”. Did I miss the lecture where we learn about how commodity speculators are calculating the net benefit of resource prices to generations a century or more into the future? But furthermore, the Invisible Hand still rests on full, free disseminated knowledge of costs and prices. If there are externalities that are not be properly accounted for, you cannot simply rely on commodity specualtion, etc., to be the transmission vehicle to express future generations’ biases into current behaviour, consumption, etc.

In any event, I actually enjoy your work. I appreciate the efforts you are making to present, reality-based, effective and coherent solutions from the right. I leave with a quote from one Jerry Taylor @ Cato on the subject: “Libertarians can’t simply dismiss the economic damages that warming might inflict on others because it will be offset by economic gains elsewhere.”

Where I say “undermines the whole rationale for using property rights as a tool”… I take that back - so long as the definition is extended to “pollution rights” as “property rights”… but it continues to be the case that the absolute levels of those rights must be informed by the science…

I still think that the better way to go to impose a cost on GHG’s is some form of Carbon Tax, rather than cap & trade, which - although it is more amenable to property rights - is going to an administrative morass…

You are correct to note that the remedy for overfishing cannot be easily applied to climate change. Privatizing the atmospheric commons is functionally impossible as far as I can tell. I did not offer the example as evidence for how I would like climate policy to go forward. I only entered those waters to to speak because you invited me for a swim in fishery management policy to discuss the how economists can or cannot prove useful.

Regardless, I do not agree with you that fisheries were put in danger because scientists were ignored. I believe that they were put in danger because government tried to manage a public commons and governments do a very bad job of that sort of thing everywhere and at all times due to the dyanmics of interest group politics. Nor do I agree with you that ITQs are some “un-libertarian.” Every libertarian resource economist that I know of have endorsed those approaches and have done so for years. In fact, the main engine behind that policy change in Iceland is a libertarian who’s written for Cato in the past.

I do not disagree with you that economists cannot adequately engage in cost-benefit analyses without getting a large amount of underlying information about impact from scientists. And that’s exactly what they do. If you read the economic literature on the subject, they all - rather uncritically - accept IPCC predictions about future temperature changes, rainfall patterns, sea level rise, extreme weather events, and so on and then translate that information into economic terms (including the impact on human wellbeing and mortality). The main thing that jumps out at you from their analysis is that the (human) world is far less vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate change than scientists seem to think and that there are a surprisingly large host of economic and human health benefits associated with warming that also have to be considered.

Of course economic agents - such as speculators - are looking out for themselves. But by doing so, they are looking out for the future. By persuing their narrow self interest, they are advancing the interests of millions whether that is part of their calculation or not. This general observation about the invisible hand was stated rather well by Adam Smith and has not been improved upon since.

I am all for internalizing negative environmental externalities. So are most economists. But their work on this area suggests that the negative externalities associated with greenhouse gas emissions are probably no more than $2 per metric ton - not enough to justify more than, say, a 2 cent increase in gasoline costs. For a review of the literature on that matter, see a recent academic survey by Richard Tol: http://www.uni-hamburg.de/Wiss/FB/15/Sustainability/enpolmargcost.pdf.

I am glad you are aware of and enjoy my work. Pass it on - posts above suggest that I am some sort of unspeakable fiend. Nonetheless, you might be disappointed to learn that Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein (no libertarian or conservative he) recently disabused me of the notion that the costs imposed on developing countries by U.S. greenhouse gas emissions is something that should necessarily animate U.S. policy: http://www.uni-hamburg.de/Wiss/FB/15/Sustainability/enpolmargcost.pdf.

“If you were told that you had a fatal disease and a Doctor told you how to get better, but then an economist came along and told you that the cost of treating you would be too high so it would be better not to do anything - would you sit there and wait to die?”

That is, in fact, what happens when you have a Government run National Health System, like our own dearly beloved NHS in the UK.

Potential treatments are evaluated by NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellece I believe although a good acronym, don’t you think?). If they are more expensive than the value of QALY (Quality Adjusted Life Years) then the treatment is not funded. For anyone. For example, Herceptin for breast cancer is not funded.

So that is indeed exactly what is done. Doctors say they might be able to treat a disease that will kill you and economists look at the costs and say, no, better not to treat them. Let them die.

"Fossil-fuel companies have spent millions funding anti-global-warming think tanks, purposely creating a climate of doubt around the science. DeSmogBlog is the antidote to that obfuscation." ~ BRYAN WALSH, TIME MAGAZINE

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